2: Arts-based Action Research

What is evident these days is whenever art occurs it nudges aside assumed conventions, upsets past complacencies and opens up new criticalities--Graeme Sullivan

To make one’s mark in the world.
To make seen the unseen.
To bear witness to the past and envision what is beyond.

Around the world, arts-imagination and arts-embodiment are seen in community art programs that provide a space, a place, a canvas for the stories of the oppressed and afflicted.

Walls of Hope is “an international art and human rights project of art, education, conflict resolution, crime prevention, diplomacy building, community development and preservation of historic memory." It grew from the work of Claudia Bernardi in Perquin, El Salvador, but the model has been replicated in Canada, Northern Ireland, Guatemala, Columbia, and other locations. The project acknowledges the trauma, the violence, the sorted histories, and allows participants to “produce a visual testimony that represents their recent history” and, through collaboration, “expands from creativity towards diplomacy, judicial concerns, and the demand for the respect for social and human rights.” These participatory works embody the collective knowledge of the community, making visible the past and disrupting stories of prejudice, hate, and violence.

At the same time, many of the murals go beyond telling to understanding for oneself and problem-solving for the future. Bernardi writes of her experience taking Walls of Hope to the Guatemala in the essay “Art Recuperates Memory as a Demand of Justice.” The team, through open-ended questions, facilitated locals in selecting their story, designing the composition, and executing the work. The participants were keen on a composition that broke the work into five segments, each representing one of the five communities from which they came, until one man brought forth a different way of seeing. Don Luis, from Chajul, spoke up:

Brothers and Sisters, until now I have believed that what happened to us in our community of Chajul was tragic. I also thought that had not happened elsewhere. To my horror I see now, that what happened in Chajul happened also in your lands. We have the same memories. We have lost families, our homes and our children. For this, I propose that we will paint a mural not divided in five parts for our stories are the same.

And with that, the composition was switched to three areas: the left representing the past, the center as the present, and the right envisioning a future.

For these locals, artmaking was a way to understand their past, understand each other, and create a new future story together. They were no longer victims of a story but critical participants empowered to change the ending. Similar to the audience in Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, the mural creators imagined change through “dialogue and mutual learning” (Keifer-Boyd 11).

MTV EXIT also used a collaborative mural approach in their Roadshow campaign in Mae Sot, Thailand. A blending place of Thai locals and Burmese refugees, MTV EXIT brought together artists from both communities “to create a mural that reflected how they could positively coexist.” The mural juxtaposes Thai and Burmese symbolism with a handshake superimposed over the composition and a line of figures uniting the sides. Other aspects of the campaign include participant-created dramas, radio theatres, local cultural performances, and celebrity musicians, all to bring awareness to trafficking and the exploitation of the vulnerable along the border. Art brought youth from the diverse groups “together to learn creative ways to raise awareness about human trafficking in their community and demonstrate the similarities between their cultures.” Art-making exposed commonalities, critiqued the discourses of discrimination and division, and made visual a larger understanding of the self and other.

I spent about ten days in the Philippines, thinking about these issues.  Wanting to sit and sketch, web, plan it out.  Put on paper what was processing inside.  The pencil in the hand--it helps me process.  My brain would think but only come up with more questions.  I hoped it might suddenly crystallize, spontaneously come together, be it while underwater on a dive or when sleeping in a hut on an isolated beach.  It didn't.

So I came back to a land of electricity and toilets that flush with a button (instead of bucket-flush), grabbed my portable whiteboard, and started marking marks on it.  I'd been thinking about an image of a tree.  What are the roots for my kids?  It is not family.  It is not country.  How can we give them a support system so they can grow a strong trunk and then branch out, confidently, in fullness and freedom?  I used words and word combinations from Wordle explorations using the text from the Blessed Homes website and the tagline of Partners: Relief and Development (Full, Free Lives for the Children of Burma). 

There are many variables still.  Which kids?  Which site?  What time frame?  I'm drawn to the young ones, especially five little girls that live in Noh Bo, the home that will be my base.  At the same time, there's something inside me that says I should work with the teens.  Then I question individual or collaborative.  Perhaps a mixture.

I've been taking my elective classes in TESOL; I made that choice based on my current teaching situation, with over 70% non-native speakers.  But in this transition, I hear it over and over again.  Teach us English.  Teach them English.  You can help by teaching English.  English is viewed as currency, as increased chance of success in future endeavors.  Simply bringing my native language to the border will empower these children for their next steps.

At the same time, I would never be content going through an English grammar textbook.  I want to connect at a deeper level.  I envision combining art and English with explorations of big ideas (dreams, hopes, risk, creation, adaptation, belonging), giving them a space and a place to find their voice.  A blank canvas.  The whiteboard where they can write and rewrite. 

So I've started to write and rewrite on my whiteboard.  Please help clarify the [undefined areas] of the problem statement.

Side note:  I've never understood the semantics arguments over labels.  The blind student.  The deaf child.  The kid with cerebral palsy.  (Dis)abled.  Differently-abled.  Until now.  I don't want my kids to be defined by their status as an orphan.  I don't want them to be defined as an (illegal) refugee.  They are my kids.  They are people.  Children.  I don't want them labeled as victims, shackled to an identity of abandoned, disadvantaged, and without people or place.  Have you seen them laugh?  Have you seen them smile?  They have the same needs, the same desires, and I want them empowered to dream.  Confident to take risks, knowing that we'll catch them.  I want to slowly remove the support from the training wheels, watch them pedal down the street, and then, when they fall and skin their knees, run to help them back up and on the bike again.  Do they really have to be burdened with the label of orphan?  From the very first introduction, a term of pity.  Not a sister, daughter, mother, lover, student, teacher, doctor, or friend.  An orphan.  So I'm open to suggestions here as well.  Is there a better phrasing, terminology, wording for my problem statement?  So far I have "refugee children who have been orphaned due to the ongoing conflict in Burma."  Ideally, they'd be children first, with any other characteristics coming after...


References:
https://elearning.psu.edu/courses/aed815/sites/edu.courses.aed815/files/content/graeme_arts-based_research.pdf
http://wallsofhope.org/about/
http://www.scu.edu/cas/jai/upload/The-brush-is-like-a-Candel-copy.pdf
Keifer-Boyd, K. (2011). Arts-based research as social justice activism: Insight, inquiry, imagination, embodiment, relationality. International Review of Qualitative Research, 5(1), 3-19.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JinMSLWyCOw
http://mtvexit.org/blog/mae-sot-roadshow/